The Insider News

Ken Shirriff's blog[^]:

By focusing on a simple circuit, the 6502 microprocessor chip can actually be understood at the silicon level. It's interesting to see how the complex patterns etched on the chip can be mapped onto gates, and their function understood.... In this article, I show how overflow is computed in the 6502 microprocessor at the transistor and silicon level. I've discussed the mathematics of the 6502 overflow flag earlier and thought it would be interesting to look at the actual chip-level implementation. Even though the overflow flag is a slightly obscure feature, its circuit is simple enough that it can be explained at the silicon level.

programming is terrible[^]:

Dijkstra is an emminently quotable computer scientst, mostly for his famous lists of uncomfortable truths. Oft repeated is his rallying call against BASIC, most of the time without context: "It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration."... The thing people forget is that programming was substantially different in 1975. Dijkstra railed against Dartmouth Basic — a glorified assembler language. It isn’t the BASIC used today.

O'Reilly Radar[^]:

Programming is changing. The PC era is coming to an end, and software developers now work with an explosion of devices, job functions, and problems that need different approaches from the single machine era. In our age of exploding data, the ability to do some kind of programming is increasingly important to every job, and programming is no longer the sole preserve of an engineering priesthood.... Where am I headed with this line of inquiry? The goal is to be able to describe the essential skills that programmers need for the coming decade, the places they should focus their learning, and differentiating between short term trends and long term shifts.

Channel 9[^]:

In this episode, Robert revisits the Windows 8 line of business app he wrote. This app provides the ability for employees to create and submit expense reports—and for managers to view and approve or reject them. Robert first reviews the app as you last saw it and then discusses what changes he made to the app's user interface and why he thinks those changes resulted in a much better app. He also announces that the app is now available for your downloading pleasure on CodePlex.

Luigi Montanez[^]:

It’s worth considering the open source and free software movements. Does Richard Stallman fall under the banner of activist engineer? Linus Torvalds? The Ubuntu and Apache teams? Have they not changed the world? I’d argue that most open source software is about craft rather than seeking societal change. Rails and Django are terrific at improving the lives of the developers who work with them every day. But they’re ultimately tools used to build things, not outcomes in and of themselves.

Forbes[^]:

Google, with Android, is the biggest threat to Microsoft. Apple operates on a similar principle to Microsoft – still taking a cut at the point of sale, although in Apple’s case they count hardware and software together, where Microsoft focuses on the software side of things. But Google, with their ‘free’ software, is playing a completely different game. The recurring revenue from users through advertising is the key. The more users in Google’s world, the better Mountain View’s bottom line. What would be a better way to expand their reach that claim not just the web browser, but the whole desktop?

Aaron Swartz[^]:

The first thing I did, which presumably all of you have already got covered, was to learn about computers, the Internet, and Internet culture. I read a bunch of books, I read enormous numbers of web pages, and I tried stuff. First I joined mailing lists and tried to understand the discussions until I felt comfortable jumping in and trying to participate for myself. Then I looked at web sites and tried to build my own. And finally I learned how to build web applications and I started building them. I was thirteen....

Bob Melton[^]:

So, during the Summer of 2002, several bloggers and tech websites speculated that Dave must be bringing Chimera to the Mac. Except that Chimera was already a Mac application and didn’t need to be ported. So what the hell was Dave doing at Apple? Building another Gecko-based Mac browser? No one knew. And none of this made much sense. Which is probably why the rumors subsided so quickly. But people would remember all of this when Safari debuted at Macworld in San Francisco on January 7, 2003...

beefycode[^]:

Let me express the only feature I really desire in the next version of Visual Studio: Replace the format of all project and solution files with PowerShell scripts. I hear you groaning – just hear me out. I have many reasons for wanting this – too many to list all but the highlights here. In a nutshell they all boil down to the notion of simplicity.

the pluralsight blog[^]:

Microsoft was quite literally founded on Basic. Few of us who were doing software development in the 90′s could argue that Visual Basic successfully lowered the bar for entry such that just about anybody could write a simple program. I would even go so far as to say that Visual Basic was a key to the success of Windows in the 90′s and 00′s.